This [1542] law differed considerably from earlier Florentine measures to regulate sodomy, both in the harsh penalties it prescribed and in other features. While distinctions between citizens and subjects were partly maintained, the age classes for adults and their corresponding penalties that had favored youths were now abolished. This change possibly signaled a new generational outlook in Medicean domestic politicsâwhich had traditionally sought to foster the support of youthâespecially since young men had abandoned the Medici in their spirited defense of the Last Republic. This edict instead returned to the simpler penal distinction of the distant past between minors and adults, though it extended the age of majority to twenty instead of eighteen. It also prescribed severe penalties, differentiated by sexual role, for minors, who had been virtually ignored in law and in judiciary practice for a century (with the exception of the 1490s).
Another significant novelty was the singling out for exemplary punishment of adult men who took the passive role in sexual relations with men. For a second conviction, all active partners, regardless of age or status, plus passive partners up to the age of twenty, were to be fined 100 scudi and sentenced to forced labor on the galleys for life. The one exception was for a man aged twenty or above who let someone sodomize him, a practice that the fifteenth-century sources indicate was both rare and deemed highly disgraceful. Found guilty a second time, the "passive" adult was to be "burned publicly as a wicked and infamous man... for his own punishment and as an example to others." For all others, death was mandated only for a third offense. For the first time in the city's history, this edict encoded Florentine repugnance against men who violated the long-standing cultural taboo on adult sexual passivity, thereby compromising their own and their society's masculinity.
Another unprecedented feature of this law was the attention it paid to the nature and extent of an individual's involvement in sodomy. Against those who had committed sodomy more than once with the same or different partners, the edict ordered judges to levy harsher penalties at their discretion, even up to the death sentence, depending on "the quality of the persons, the length of time they have persevered in this vice, the number of those with whom they have committed this error, and the habit they have made of it." Previously the number of partners and the frequency of sexual encounters had had no apparent effect on either sentences or penalties, though magistrates tended, somewhat inconsistently, to levy harsher penalties on "inveterate" sodomites who came frequently to their attention. Among other things, fifteenth century officials' lack of concern with such details had permitted a sexual culture to flourish in which teenage prostitution and promiscuity were common and men could act on their homoerotic desires repeatedly and over long periods of their lives. This new measure, however, drew a sharper distinction between those whose involvement in sodomy was fleeting or casual and those, more culpable and subject to greater stigma, whose illicit erotic activity was more intense or habitual.
In many respects, therefore, the harsh provisions of the 1542 law seem to delineate a hardening of attitudes toward sodomy and a repressive turn in measures to police it. But this law also had contradictory effects that again underline the persistent difficulty and ambiguities of managing sodomy in Florence. [...] A review of judiciary records for the central decades of the sixteenth century has found, in fact that while condemnations for sodomy burgeoned in the 1540s, they dropped off sharply in the 1550s. From this point on, convictions remained fairly insignificant in number (though not in the severity of punishments) well into the seventeenth century.
